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Configuring a Sentry Error Tracking on a Compute Instance

This tutorial details how to setup a Sentry server on a Scaleway compute instance to start error tracking in your applications.

Sentry Overview

Sentry is an open source solution for error tracking in applications. It is written in Python and can provide real-time reporting of errors in applications based on a client/server architecture. You can easily integrate it into your applications via its SDK and let them automatically report the errors via common messaging tools like Slack, IRC and more. This helps to reduce the time for development of your applications and increases the user experience. You can find all reports on a dashboard which makes it easy to triage the problem - how often it occurs, which impact it has on the user experience of your application, which part of your code causes the problem and so on.

Installing Sentry

In this tutorial, we will install sentry on a Ubuntu Xenial based instance.

Configuring Sentry

1 . Initialize Sentry:

sentry init /etc/sentry

This command will create the configuration files in the directory /etc/sentry.

Note: You can also specify any other directory for your configuration files by replacing the part /etc/sentry. If you run sentry init without specifying the path, the files will be stored in the directory ~/.sentry.

2 . Edit the file /etc/sentry/sentry.conf.py and add the database credentials: It should look like the following example:

Your Sentry server is running now, and you can integrate it with your applications. You can also add additional features by adding different Plugins into Sentry.

Connecting to the Sentry interface

1 . Once the installation is finished, connect from a browser: http://your.sentry.server.ip/

2 . Login with the user that you have created at the upgrade function during the installation.

You will be requested to finish the installation by providing some additional parameters and, once you have done, the Sentry Dashboard displays:

To create a new project click on the button in the top right corner and choose your environment. Sentry will show you instructions how to implement it in your project.

Sentry is a mighty tool that can be used to automatize your workflow and increase the user experience by reducing the time to market of your applications. There are many SDK’s for various programming languages available and you can check the documentation for your favourite language.